And we've got all the time in the world to enjoy it!

We're MARRIED! Man, it has been a CRAZY adventure getting to this day. The wedding took a lot of planning, work, and help from friends. And you guys were a big part of getting it all started!

Rolith and I have known each other since 2007, when we were both working for Artix Entertainment remotely. We talked a lot online, and worked really well together, but neither of us knew we would work SO well together that we'd want to spend the rest of our lives with each other - playing, working, and building a future. In joining the AE crew, we found friends (who grew to be as close as family) and got to create games for all of you!

It's not a real party unless you've saved the world first!

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Retro Arcade Game Made in a Day

If you thought Flappy Bird was hard, you gotta try this app. It is hard, retro, hard, simple and super hard. Lasting 10 seconds pretty much means you are a gaming god. Tell you what. Get over 1,000 points and the entire internet will bow down before you claiming you are the ultimate gaming god of the universe.

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Looooongest day ever! Rolith is sick, Alina is sick, Verlyrus is the most amazing person ever helping us code on his birthday (so totally wish him happy birthday), Tomix was up until 4am his time working on the cutscenes, Dracelix made another weapon for you guys, and Cronix did last minute awesome art on the ninjas today too (after creating the ghouls as his first ever monsters last week and the Alina monster this week) before he had to go! It's been a craaaaaazy day! 

Now, though, you get to play through the real-life-inspired quest of Rolith's Bachelor Party! Artix did an amzing job planning the real life event and has even more to tell you and show you!

How’s it going guys?  It’s been a while.  I wanted to stop by and give you a heads up as to what’s going on with me and DragonFable lately. 

As many of you know I’ve been helping out with Oversoul as it gets ready for beta.  I’ve been working on the Server while Warlic has been making great strides on the server.  That said, DF is still my number-one priority whenever possible.  We’re making great progress into Book 3, and while I’d like to be keeping up the to-do list in front of me is very very long.

Here’s a list of things I am not sworn to secrecy about and are on there.  These are not ordered by priority, and not all may be accomplished “soon” but will hopefully all be accomplished.

• Mogloween Badge Bugs – I’ve got to play through all of Mogloween 100% legitimately to test the fixes I’m working on for these.  I’ve been doing that while live streaming with you guys (Follow me on Twitter to see when those happen) but it’s a big process. We’ve had a LOT of Mogloween content to play through and a lot of masks to unlock.
• Warmonger badges – These require a special unique bit of code that we don’t have in the engine, and new engine builds are usually pretty big projects.
• New Badges added to the Character Pages.
• Fixes for DragonLord, both sound and color customization issues. – This is being held up by Ghost’s recent computer issues.  We were trying to make sure we weren’t walking over each other’s progress on them and are still trying to sync up. 
• Fixing the boat minigame for the bay release.
• Player Created Content design finalized – The new plans for Player Created content are a massive improvement over the original goals and still very much in the cards.  But it’s also such a large scale project that we more or less need it 100% designed before we really start getting involved.

There’s a lot of other things that need doing, but the major one (Pyromancer) is already in Verlyrus’ capable hands.  He’s making huge progress and we’re loving Tomix’s animations on them.

There is one other thing... Something small.  I’m forgetting it.  Man…

Oh Right!:

• I’m getting married to Alina in a week!

That puts a lot of the rest of my todo list in a bit of a perspective, huh?  I’ve been running around the state of Florida (home of the Secret Underground Lab) and calling people across the continent to make sure everyone we can manage will be able to be here in comfort and style for our wedding.  It’s been a long, crazy, process that started over 2 years ago.

Now, it comes to the point of the design notes I’ve been dreading.  There’s no easy way to say this so I’ll be blunt:  I ran out of time.  There were big plans to get a wedding event in both AQW and DF now that Alina is running AQW’s releases and I’m lead coder on DragonFable, but things just aren’t going to work out.  I’m not going to have time to get a wedding event in DragonFable.  There will be a huge party in AQW, written by my lovely wife-to-be, but DF’s not going to have one by Friday.

Alina tells me she won't accept that answer, but I've convinced her to wait until AFTER the wedding to try to put something together. She needs to stay as sane as I do.

It stinks, but it’s the only way I’ll be getting through this week happy and as calm as possible.  We love you guys, and thank you immensely, and I’m sorry I’m disappointing so many of you. Alina promises that she'll have a Wedding Shop in Falconreach for you, though, so look for that this Friday! (Remember the Cysero wedding shop? It'll be like that.)

Well, unfortunately, some things went BOOM this week! So, we're not going to be freeing those docks just yet....

What we wanted to do for this week was present you with this!

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Discuss.

• Alex Saga reward
• War finale
• Player-created quests (back on my to-do list!)
• Wedding event

PS - Sorry I haven't been talkative lately. Lots to do on other projects. Server coding is boring.

Hey guys!  Just dropping in to let you know you should go check out the all-new, MUCH more titanically-awesome DragonLord class, which Ghost and I put a LOT of effort into.

This new skill set is not finalized.  I'm still working on tweaking the skills and powers, so expect buffs and debuffs next week. But I can promise that it will be worthy of the noble Order of DragonLords. A DragonLord should feel powerful! That's the whole point of commanding a dragon, right? We hope you enjoy it!

One last Happy Birthday from me. Thanks for all the memories you've helped create these last 6 years; I can't imagine where I would be, or the rest of the DF team, without your support!

Now I'm going to go take some allergy medicine and sleep.  

Alina Edit: Rolith went to bed shortly after writing the previous Design Notes. A few minutes ago I got an instant message which read:

Rolith says (11:17 PM)
Wrote the dsign notes happy birthday typos
need you to fix them make it sound happy

Rolith says (11:18 PM)
where's my cake? geo said cake

Alina says (11:20 PM)
Go back to sleep. I'll make sure they can understand your Happy Birthday Design Notes!
We don't have cake, but you can poke geo for some tomorrow.

Rolith says (11:20 PM)
Dragon-shaped caaaaaaaaaaake! Make it happen.

Happy birthday, DragonFable players! It's been a fantastic six years full of fighting, friends, and FANTASTIC stories! Thank you all for staying with us and supporting us as the game grows!

Hey guys, just a quick check in to let you know if you're one of the people racing to level 80, you'll have the level 80 tier DoomKnight items awaiting you now.  If you have already hit 80 (wow!), then they'll be in your inventory the next time you log in!

Now I figured I'd also take some time to share some VERY INTERESTING numbers.

I love those kinds of numbers, and thought you guys would like to know them, too!

Right now, we are working on some tools to make Chapter 2 more interesting while continuing the clean up of Chapter 1, so it helps to keep track of things like how many players are at each of the different levels. Level 40 seems to be about the average for completing Chapter 1's main storyline. 

Forum question: What level are YOU, and how long did it take you to get there? How many hours a week do you play, and do you just play through the release, or farm for the epic rewards? Let us know on the Forum!

Cya on Twitter, too!

Two weeks ago I snuck out of the underground lab a week early to get a head start on my holiday wanderings.  My brother graduated college and I was determined to be there if at all possible.  A week later Alina joined me and since than we've been bouncing between families, extended families, and one flight halfway across the country.  During these wanderings I caught what I'm calling the PA Plague, a wicked sinus infection that has left me still reeling almost a week later.  

That said, I've been hard at work on four things for you guys.  

• A fun micro-challenge for the final quest of this week
• An insane boss fight using a feature we haven't used since a holiday many years ago (let's see if the current engine can handle it!)
• One is the ChronoCorruptor class you guys have been taking a look at for the last couple of days
• And the last is this year's Frostval present, the Togslayer Armor. (Those of you who have been around for a while might know exactly how amusing that sentence was for me to type.)

Here comes the point in the design notes where the two different topics come slamming together.

While I'm having a lot of fun getting the monsters and quest ready for you guys (it still could be a late one, we'll be doing things rarely done in the game)  I don't think we'll be getting the classes out when we originally planned.  My plague has left me cloudy-headed and without much of a mind for the complicated process of designing and implementing the epic skills necessary to make these classes EXPLODE on your screens.  

Once this vile debuff wears off, rest assured we'll be releasing the class as I finish each skill so you guys can be included in it's design. That way, you will be able to provide ample feedback and input for the entire process.

It's really unfortunate that this plague had to infect me NOW, but both of these classes have amazing animations and I want to give them the time, attention and finesse they deserve, even if one of them is really, really* silly.

* Really, really, really... Really, really, really - *deep breath* REALLY, REALLY, REALLY silly.

And all through the lab, coders, writers, and artists were making such a noise that it completely ruins the meter of this story, so I'm not even going to bother.

So, preparations have continued and by the look of things we're going to have the MOST secure Frostval ever!  No sign of Xan or Zadd, either. And if I so much as HEAR the term eggnog-nomicon...  the moglin-stocks are ready and waiting.  

But that's no reason to be festive.  I'm doing everything to keep the Moglins upbeat and happy.  I even alloted a half hour every day for mandatory "Silly Hat Time!"  The moglins seem hesitant to participate.

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Hey guys!  Seems like every time I manage to find time to do design notes, I'm pointing out how long it's been since my last ones.  Not this time! ... Wait...

So what have I been up to lately?  Alexander, mostly.  Getting his character slot ready took a lot of work and unlocking it and opening the game engine up for our plans with him was a taxing job. Most of the time I have to work on DragonFable was filled with it.  

This story is so awesome! I've been excited for it for as long as we've known he was going to have it told. Hope you guys enjoy this story as much as I'm going to enjoy helping it come to life!

I've also been plotting... since before last year's Frostval had even started.  Merry Togsmas everyone! 

Geo's got a great script for this year's holiday and I'm looking forward to your reaction to this week's quest.  It's going to be a wild ride.

I've also been working on my own version of the "12 Days of Frostval" for Alina.  She's getting small presents every day throughout the holidays, each accompanied with the lines: "On the X day of Frostval for my true love, I give to you..."  :-P  We're up to day three.  I didn't write them ahead of time, so the challenge for ME is finding a way to work the number into the gift's name. So... any ideas of things I could get her?

It's been a while, Wait, Really? JULY?  Wow, I'm sorry guys.

So where have I been?  Here!  Working!  Over the past few months, I've coded a new class, a bunch of new monsters, and a handful of new quest features, most of which involve making it easier to do things that we've had to avoid doing because they're so time intensive.  I've also been working on my own game.

Some of you've heard about PonyVsPony but I figgured I'd share a link for those of you who haven't.  It's a fun, addictive little puzzle game which was released at DragonCon this year and have been improving ever since.  I'm still working on making it as awesome as possible inbetween my various other projects here at Artix Entertainment. Be sure to check it out!  It features the awesome art stylings of Jemini and Yergen from the MechQuest and HeroSmash team.  Pony On!

But you guys are here for DragonFable news!  I've started working on playing through the entirty of DragonFable, all the while I've been making notes and marking down bugs to add to my todo list.  This project's a LONG term one, as DragonFable is a LONG game (3 hours in and I'm not done everything there is to do in Oaklore)  but it's already bearing fruit.  This week, i'm going to work on some of the Oaklore bugs I've found as well as changing Falconreach to make one of your favorite stories easier to find. 

I'm also returning to the Player Created Content System that has been left to sit idle for too long.  Once I get back up to speed on that project I'll post a nice long design notes about how it's going to change moving forward, because I've got some big ideas!

It has been an honur and a pleasure to punish you guys over the last almost two months.  You've done it, 20 Million Waves.  Enjoy your well earned rest, it won't last long.  Chapter One's finale continues next Friday.

As I post this, the limited quantity shop is hosting a new item!  Less then 1600 of these guys are left:

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Today's the one day this week I had to work on DragonFable.  I managed to actually find a hole in the schedule where I could take a couple of days off early this week and get some R&R and once I got back there were a couple of boring behind the scenes projects that I had to attend to. 

But instead of just working my metal-plated pants off to get the release done, I have ALSO put on my plate the current DF Bugs List.  I've got seven bugfixes planned, and here they are:

• Speed up PVP and stop returning bad results
• Stop Fire War from being Linked to current war count
• Stop Ravenloss war from being tied to the war count
• Stop the Nature Orb meter from being tied to the current war
  • Also make it so all waves can be triggered
• Hiding Cape or Helm hides weapon
  • Not sure why, but can't duplicate this--it might be fixed in the engine that rolls live.  who knows.  I'll keep an eye out for new reports after tomorrow.
• Properly set items as non-shown when armor is switched
• Fix the 0-0 damage weapon when you unequip basic weapon

No promise of all these getting fixed, but I'll do my best.  All FIXED bugs will roll out tonight.

Update: 

So, looks like 6/7 of the bugs are fixed.  I'm wating on Verlyrus to get online to help test these fixes and get me more bugs :) 

More Bugs Fixed:

• Baffet has returned to Sunbreeze grove.  Akriloth must have scared him off.
• Verteroche Crossing fixed on the travel map.
• Going to Surewood via travel map goes to modern map, not outdated one